Wire service changes as New Year begins

Saturday

Jan 5, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Many of us spent some time as 2012 drew to a close and 2013 commenced reflecting on the past year. I saw several friends on Facebook write about what a challenging year 2012 turned out to be and how they hoped 2013 would be better.

Chad Killebrew

Many of us spent some time as 2012 drew to a close and 2013 commenced reflecting on the past year. I saw several friends on Facebook write about what a challenging year 2012 turned out to be and how they hoped 2013 would be better.The year certainly brought a major change for us at The Dispatch. The New York Times Co. sold its 16 regional newspapers, including The Dispatch, to Halifax Media Group. Sunday will mark the one-year anniversary of the closing of the sale. Halifax bought 19 newspapers from Freedom Communications during the summer and now ranks as the 12th largest newspaper country in the United States.Most of our associations with The New York Times ended fairly quickly, including use of Times stories on our website, but one endured until the end of the year: the use of content from The New York Times News Service in our print publication. The stories and photographs from the news service appeared primarily on our lifestyles pages but also showed up on occasion in the news, business and sports sections. The opinion page featured columnists who wrote for the Times.The Dispatch was going to have to pay for this service in 2013 and beyond at a rather hefty rate. So we decided to change to the McClatchy-Tribune News Service, which offered a much more reasonable price and some other advantages I'll discuss later. We also continue to use content from The Associated Press as well.Our focus is local news, and our goal each day is to fill The Dispatch with as much content generated by our staff as possible. But we can't fill an entire edition, so that's where content from the wire services comes into play. Plus readers want to know what's happening outside Davidson County, too.Sometimes the print edition features very little content from our wire services. Normally we populate the News Briefing on page 2A and our sports standings on page 2B with AP content. Depending on how much space we have to fill and the number of local stories, copy from the wire services may be used in the news, lifestyles or sports sections as well.Print readers will notice a couple of changes on a regular basis with the elimination of NYT content. Jane Brody's health column will no longer appear every other Tuesday. And the NYT columnists who appeared — David Brooks, Gail Collins, Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman — will also be gone.The opinion page normally features 10 columns each week. Local guest columnists take two spots, Scott Mooneyham's column on state issues appears twice a week, and John Hood's column on state matters prints once. So that leaves five other spots for syndicated and wire columnists.We pay for columns by Clarence Page, Kathleen Parker and Cal Thomas, so one from each of them appears most weeks. So that just leaves two remaining spots, which is where I was rotating the NYT columnists. Now columnists whose work appears on the McClatchy-Tribune wire will be used. I will continue to seek a balance between liberal and conservative columnists as well.Another aspect of the MCT wire that excites me is the availability of stories from the Charlotte Observer and Raleigh News & Observer. This will provide news coverage from North Carolina's capital along with its largest city. From a sports standpoint, we'll gain access to stories about the state's professional teams as well as coverage of Atlantic Coast Conference sports.The subscriber guide for MCT says the news service moves about 250 stories a day (AP, by contrast, moves thousands). We will use only a fraction of them, primarily on the lifestyles pages, but I believe we'll be able to choose interesting ones that will appeal to our readers.The switch from The New York Times News Service to McClatchy-Tribune marks the first change in wire services probably in 25 to 30 years. The last change would have occurred when The Dispatch dropped United Press International, which used to be a competitor to the AP. That happened sometime before I came here in 1989.Change always brings some uncertainty, and our editors are still learning what content MCT offers, what day it appears, where to find photographs, etc. But when you see a story originating in Sacramento, Miami, Chicago or other cities, you'll know it came from an MCT-affiliated newspaper. As always, let me know if you have any comments about the change.Chad Killebrew is executive editor of The Dispatch. He can be reached at 249-3981, ext. 215, or at chad.killebrew@the-dispatch.com.

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